Assessing investigative skills in history: a case study from Scotland

Recent changes in our history syllabi stress the importance of developing an investigative/enquiry method of learning involving the framing of questions, subsequent research and the presentation of findings. Scotland has made several attempts to assess not only the end result (the paper) but also the process itself and now uses an extended essay format in two important history courses that come at the end of secondary schooling. This article discusses how we experimented before we decided on these various approaches to assessing investigative skills and evaluates the extended essay solution with particular reference to the comments of students and teachers. This analysis expands a previous article on the assessment of investigative skills which appeared in this journal

Intimacy and Antipathy: Ukrainian–Russian Relations in Historical Perspective

Explores what the complex entangled histories of Russia and Ukraine can teach us about their trouble relationship today

Ukrainophile Activism and Imperial Governance in Russia's Southwestern Borderlands

Explores the relationship between the Ukrainian nation-building process and the tsarist state

CSi in South Africa: Examining CSI Strategy, Practice, and Attitudes with a Focus on Social Enterprise and Blended Value

The project aimed to: Identify attitudes and practices among leading CSI officers in South Africa surrounding CSI objectives, CSI strategy, and major philanthropy models, particularly social enterprise and blended valueAssess the market for Heart's Blended Value Proposition Funds among CSI officer

Drift compensation circuit for analog to digital converter Patent

Voltage drift compensation circuit for analog-to-digital converte

Helping to keep history relevant : mulitmedia and authentic learning

The subject based curriculum attracts lively debate in many countries being accused of fragmenting teaching and learning, erecting artificial barriers and failing to teach the skills required in the twenty first century (Hazlewood 2005). Cross-curricular rich tasks are increasingly seen as the means to develop relevant knowledge, understanding and skills. Over the past fourteen years we have developed and evaluated a series of interactive multi-media resources for primary and secondary schools on themes within Scottish History. The generally positive evaluation given to these resources by pupils and teachers points to some ways in which subjects such as history can remain challenging and relevant. The relevance has largely stemmed, in the case of the multi-media resources, from combining the historian's traditional role of problemising the past, with a wide range of primary and secondary sources, new technologies and learning tasks encompassing critical skills/authentic learning. Consequently, we argue that subjects must in future embrace new technologies and authentic learning to maintain their place in the school curriculum

Renal function, revascularization and risk

Peer reviewedAuthor versio

Adoption as a Social Marker: Innovation Diffusion with Outgroup Aversion

Social identities are among the key factors driving behavior in complex societies. Signals of social identity are known to influence individual behaviors in the adoption of innovations. Yet the population-level consequences of identity signaling on the diffusion of innovations are largely unknown. Here we use both analytical and agent-based modeling to consider the spread of a beneficial innovation in a structured population in which there exist two groups who are averse to being mistaken for each other. We investigate the dynamics of adoption and consider the role of structural factors such as demographic skew and communication scale on population-level outcomes. We find that outgroup aversion can lead to adoption being delayed or suppressed in one group, and that population-wide underadoption is common. Comparing the two models, we find that differential adoption can arise due to structural constraints on information flow even in the absence of intrinsic between-group differences in adoption rates. Further, we find that patterns of polarization in adoption at both local and global scales depend on the details of demographic organization and the scale of communication. This research has particular relevance to widely beneficial but identity-relevant products and behaviors, such as green technologies, where overall levels of adoption determine the positive benefits that accrue to society at large.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure

Impro-Vision

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. I love to look out on my cousin\u27s pond, the ice nearly two inches thick, deep ridges cut into the surface with the many scalpel like blades of our Michelle Quan imitations. The cat tails frozen in time with snow snuffing the tips of their protruding bobs. My foot squished into little white numbers...two sizes too small